Ken Greller, Playwright/Neo-Luddite

What is your name and where are you from?My name is Ken Greller. I am originally from Baltimore, MD. Now I live in New York City.

What have you been working on at SPACE?I have been working on a “final” (yes, I put that in quotes…) draft of a play that I have been working on for most of 2013 called Troll. The play is based on the real life incident in which a journalist who worked for Gawker named Adrian Chen outed an internet troll who called himself Violentacrez on the social news aggregating website Reddit. The play is about the consequences thereof.

How have you been spending your time at SPACE?The ironic thing about working on this play about the Internet has been being really unplugged at SPACE. I leave my phone and possessions behind because I don’t need them. I am someone who can never work at home. I am always in a coffee shop or in public. So, it has been really nice to have time alone time away from home in the beautiful outdoors. In NYC, I am much less likely to go outside and sit with my laptop to write. But here it is easy to do that. I have had a lot of “me time” with the play—reading it over, trying to discover things that I haven’t discovered yet, having conversations with myself that are harder to have in a place that is less quiet and serene.

What spaces have you enjoyed working in?I have been working on the deck a lot. And I went down to work by the lake one morning, alongside Rachel Bonds and Hayley Treider. I was on a laptop, Rachel was in a notebook, and Hayley was watching videos. We were all doing different things. And that energy was great.

What’s next for you?I am excited to share this play with people. Because I have spent this time at SPACE with this play I now know this play really well, and I am more confident about it and I am able to talk about it. Nothing concrete is happening with this play yet, but the meetings that I’ll have about it or the coffee dates that I’ll have over it will go better because I really can talk about it so well. And I owe that to these last five days of being in it. And I started something new here, too.

What is the new project?Who knows! But I have thirty pages. It is an idea that I have been kicking around that I had not really known how to start. And I just started it here.

If you were to be reincarnated as a farm animal, what farm animal would you be and why?I have been really interested in the sheep here—and especially the phenomenon of when you walk by and one of them looks up that they all look up and stare at you. I don’t know if I would want to be a creepy sheep, but their commitment to “what’s going on over there?” and intent looking at whatever or whoever is really amazing. So I’ll say a sheep.